Fri Aug 22 2008 10:45:00

SAN CLEMENTE, California

—Eight-time ASP World Champion and runaway ratings leader on the 2008 ASP World Tour Kelly Slater has turned 36 this year and shows no signs of slowing down. SURFER Magazine recently caught up with the Floridian phenom and this is what went down...

Story by Brad Melekian

CHAPTER 1: Meet Kelly Slater.

"We all live an illusion of who we are. Probably lots and lots of illusions of who we actually are. And it's hard to know the truth of who you are."

First of all, I have no idea how Kelly Slater sleeps.
If I was forced to hazard an answer, I'd say "well", because he answered yes to two critical questions that I asked him: 1) Have you made enough money that you never have to work again? and 2) Is it true that you're staying in a house with your girlfriend and her seven female college roommates?

If I was forced to hazard an answer, I'd say "well", because he answered yes to two critical questions that I asked him: 1) Have you made enough money that you never have to work again? and 2) Is it true that you're staying in a house with your girlfriend and her seven female college roommates?

Yes to both, he told me, and that sounds like a nice eight hours and a couple of solid REM cycles to me.

Second of all, and truth be told, I don't much care how Kelly Slater sleeps. Or where, for that matter.

I'm much more interested in what Kelly Slater thinks, and if what he says he thinks is true.

Like when he perpetually tells people that he doesn't know if he'll continue to compete on the ASP World Tour. Or when he tells his competitors that he loves them.

Is it true? Or is it simply what a guy who lives his life under constant scrutiny says to muddy the waters and protect himself in the process?

Those questions I don't know the answer to. What I do know is that Kelly Slater is charming, charismatic, intelligent and eminently believable, which makes him refreshingly different from many of the mouthbreathing, entitlement-minded pro surfers for whom he paved the way. It also makes him a dutifully skeptical journalist's worst nightmare. Aside from the times when he's being downright transparent in trying to plant something into a story, he is hard to read. Like when he told me about the chicken heart that scientists kept alive in a Petri dish for seven years because, you know, "What you put into something, you get out of it." That's the type of line that might put a syrupy sportswriter's pen to bubbling, but makes most people cautious.

This, of course, is because he knows the game. He's been interviewed thousands of times by now, and as a writer friend of mine who's one of the dozens of writers to have profiled Kelly once told me, "He always gives you the goods." So you can't blame Kelly Slater for sounding as refined as he does when he speaks to you. Because he just may be.

But what, exactly, does that leave you with?

"When you do something, you've got to hope that it can keep leading somewhere else." That sense of progress bleeds into many areas of Slater's life, including the golf course.

The greatest surfer ever is 36, and that's about all we know for sure. As a sportsman, he's at the top of his game, dominating the professional surfing tour at will ("I know I can go out and win a heat when I want to," he says in a way that somehow succeeds at not sounding arrogant). As a celebrity, he's found ways not just to cope with his fame, but to make it work for him. And as a person, he may just be hitting his stride.

Of course, in the end, it probably doesn't matter whether any of us choose to believe him. Because, at 36, Kelly Slater is finding new ways to make the system work for him.

CHAPTER 2: The greatest surfer of all time.

"I always had this theory since I was a young kid that if I made every aspect...

For full article check out SURFER Mag's 'Kelly Slater at 36'

For more on Kelly Slater, check out his ASP WORLD TOUR PROFILE